Safe Navigation of Pedestrians in Social Groups in a Virtual Urban Environment

Most prior crowd simulations do not have groups of people moving in a social manner. In our work, we use a two-level steering system based on two classes: group agent and pedestrian agent. By interpolating the current and desired slot positions of the group agent according to formation templates, dynamic social group formations can be achieved and can also adapt to the width of passageways by using our proposed ray casting technique. Based on this interpolation approach, we introduce slot-locking which keeps subgroups in a group shoulder-to-shoulder regardless of the current formation state assuming sufficient surrounding space exists. When this happens, hand holding between adjacent members may occur. Individual characteristics such as age and body shape impact the overall group speed. In an immersive evaluation using a head-mounted display (HMD), participants validated the realism of dynamic social group behavior as virtual pedestrians safely navigated via traffic light crosswalks and sidewalks with vehicular traffic encountered on the way.